jail, he went to see Richard Rogers,
whose bold, high-tech architecture had
made him one of England's most ad-
mired and controversial cultural figures.
After looking at Adjaye's design plans,
Rogers wrote a letter to the head of the
council. It read, in part, "David Adjaye
is one of the best architects of his gener-
ation in Britain, and this house reflects
his great ability. I have absolutely no
doubt that this house will be seen, in
due course, as an example of its age."
The charges were dropped, and the
newly appointed head of the council
asked Adjaye to come and see him. He
told Adjaye that he was managing a pro-
gram to build or renovate local libraries
throughout London, and that he and
other council members were conducting
a national competition to choose the ar-
chitects. "He arranged for me to enter
the final stage of the competition," Ad-
jaye said. "I worked like crazy. I brought
all the experience I'd had in Japan into
it, and made something that was trans-
parent, with open systems, and I won."
Elektra House (where the original own-
ers still live) and the two libraries he
built in London established Adjaye's in-
ternational presence. Okwui Enwezor,
the director of the Haus der Kunst, in
Munich, is showing a full-scale replica
of Elektra House next fall, as part of
a retrospective exhibition of Adjaye's
work that he has co-organized with the
Art Institute of Chicago, where it will
appear in 2015. "The house is like a
sculpture," he told me. "David may not
think of himself as an artist, but he
works like an artist."
When I was in London this sum-
mer, Adjaye took me to see the
larger of his two libraries, or Idea
Stores, in London's East End. This
one is in Whitechapel. It's an exuber-
ant five-story building whose green-
and-white glass façade echoes the
striped green-and-white awnings
above the multinational market stalls
on the wide sidewalk in front. Between
the glass façade and the interior, an es-
calator runs diagonally from the street
to the top floor. It wasn't running that
day, but Judith St John, the Idea Store's
director, told us that people come to
ride it just for the views. Adjaye said
that the escalator had been inspired by
Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano's
Pompidou Center, in Paris; he has
used the same device in many of his
later buildings, placing stairways adja-
cent to the front wall, where they
don't take up interior space. "We get
seven hundred thousand visits a year,"
St John said. "We're open seven days a
week." Each of the five floors was
teeming with people of all ages. There
was an international café, and rooms
for lectures, performances, and meet-
ings, but there were also plenty of
nooks and corners where people were
reading or using their laptops. The
Idea Store, Adjaye has said, is "a new
type of institution, but one which has
the accessibility of a shop."
There is no clearly defined Adjaye
style, no signature or formula. His public
buildings are open and welcoming, filled
with bright colors and daylight, which he
"harvests"---Adjaye's word---from unex-
pected sources; his private houses turn
away from the urban world, shutting it
out to provide serene and uncluttered re-
treats, like Elektra House. (Adjaye him-
self lives in a surprisingly bourgeois---
"bougie," he calls it---apartment in
Whitehall, overlooking the Thames,
which he renovated without eradicating
its Edwardian elegance.) What runs
through all his work is a sculptural use of
materials---quite often inexpensive prod-
ucts like chipboard and plywood, which
he transforms, through finishes and ex-
quisite craftsmanship, into something
rich and strange. The Dirty House, built
for the artists Sue Webster and Tim
Noble, in Shoreditch, confronts the
street with mirror-glass windows and a
rough-textured layer of bitumen paint,
the kind that is applied to lampposts to
make them graffitiproof. It looks black,
but Webster, a quick-witted sculptor,
whose husband, Tim, was at the Royal
College at the same time as Adjaye, as-
sured me that it is "very, very dark brown,
the color of David's skin." (Adjaye says
it's really aubergine.) Webster blames
Adjaye for making Shoreditch trendy.
She pointed out several nearby buildings
that have been painted black, including
the upmarket Shoreditch House across
the street.
Very few of Adjaye's London proj-
ects could be called high-end. He has
done some moderately expensive houses
for people who interest him, but, with
the exception of the Nobel Peace Cen-
ter, in Oslo, which was commissioned
in 2002 and opened in 2005, most
of his public buildings benefit minor-
ity groups in non-affluent neighbor-
hoods. The Bernie Grant Arts Centre,
named for one of the first black politi-
cians elected to Parliament, in 1987,
is a teaching and performing-arts com-
plex in Tottenham. The Stephen Law-
rence Centre, which has a Chris Ofili
abstract design embedded in its floor-
to-ceiling glass façade, offers sup-
plementary classes for high-school
students in a tough neighborhood in
South Londo n ---Stephen Lawrence,
"I say bring them into the process while we still can."